LOOKING FOR LUNCH WITH: Alix Kates Shulman; A Feminist at Walden Pond

By MOLLY O'NEILL

Published: May 31, 1995

AS she strolled through Central Park, Alix Kates Shulman, the feminist novelist and social advocate, looked like any number of well-seasoned New Yorkers. The acceptance of a certain age seemed to soften the web of concern in the corners of her eyes. Her pace was still purposeful, even though these days Ms. Shulman tends to pursue the wild and the edible with the passion she once reserved for tossing off sexual conventions and gender stereotypes.

She kept pointing to and expounding on the park's edible greens.

"Dock! Yellow dock!" she cried out. "The leaves can be steamed with garlic, like spinach, but it has a delicious, citric taste. And it produces millions of little brown, wonderful seeds that I use baking muffins or banana bread. And dandelions! If you pick the buds before they flower and pan-fry them, they're delicious, almost as sweet as zucchini flowers."

To hear the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society sounding like Euell Gibbons is to worry the fate of feminism. At least initially.

But ambling along in sensible black sneakers, Ms. Shulman, who is 62, tread this troubling notion as carefully as she did the grass around clumps of dandelion greens, patches of purslane and miniature forests of wild chives in the park.

Ms. Shulman said that in 1982, feminism was stagnating on the national agenda. Her first novel, "Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen" (1972), sounded a clarion call for feminism, but the politics of the 1980's, along with a tepid marriage and an empty nest, she said, "were making me feel irrelevant, on the road to obsolete." And so in 1982 she went to the family's vacation shack for six months. Alone on a rocky jut of a Maine island, she tested the mettle of her tightly wrapped city soul against the vicissitudes of nature and embarked on a 10-year odyssey that she describes in "Drinking the Rain," a memoir that Farrar, Straus & Giroux published last month. Without benefit of electricity or indoor plumbing -- to say nothing of a deli -- the cause-after-cause, deadline-after-deadline, die-hard feminist eked out meals from the woods and bay, lived by the tides rather than the clock, looking for dinner, she wrote, as well as for "who I am when the tide runs out."

On the island, slogging through slippery seaweed and prodding mud for mussels, snails and clams, she stopped analyzing the world long enough to understand it as she experienced it: a complicated collage whose components are as interdependent as they are paradoxical -- male and female, rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, wild and tame, cooked and raw. Dinner is never far from Ms. Shulman's conversation.

She is not ashamed to say that she cooks every day. "It's true that cooking became a symbol of women's oppression, so there's a certain paradox in glorifying it, a certain danger politically," she said.

Besides, the cooking she talked about -- sweating dandelion greens in garlic over a low, slow flame; chopping wild apples with a Zenlike precision to make chutney; joining land and sea by seasoning steamed clams with minced wild lovage -- recalled spiritual practice more than home economy.

On one level, Ms. Shulman's book could be read as "the feminist goes to Walden Pond." Her retreat to nature, after all, occurred at a time when ecological concerns were becoming more intertwined with feminism and when reaction to technology was, among the middle class, making nature seem romantic again.

"I used to see how everything is connected through the pervasiveness of the gender system," Ms. Shulman said. "After the island, I saw even deeper levels of connection: politics, taste, environment, waste, dinner."

"Drinking the Rain" also echoes books from other leaders of the second wave of feminism. Gloria Steinem's "Revolution Within" (Little, Brown, 1993) and Betty Friedan's "The Fountain of Age" (Simon & Schuster, 1993) address the personal and political issues of aging.

"I thought I was writing of my own unique experience," said Ms. Shulman, who studied history and philosophy as a graduate student. "But when you interact with nature, one of the first things you learn is that no experience is unique, no event is isolated, nothing happens by accident."

Nature, she said, constantly weighs its own paradoxes. And so does she.

For the former full-time advocate, there is a paradox in the fact that she now lives as much of the year as possible in the crude shack in Maine, isolated from politics and ferment.

When the weather makes it impossible to live without heat, she returns to the loft in Chelsea that, for the last decade, she has shared with the high school sweetheart whom she met again after her second marriage dissolved. In New York, she remains active in the pro-choice movement as well as in a number of feminist organizations.

A modern Persephone, she is at ease shuttling between contemplativeness and advocacy. Still, she said, there are political dangers in writing a book about returning to nature and the return to self, particularly at a time when right-wing survivalists are championing nature.